Rebuilding a 962 motor

[VZ935]

Are you going to keep the ti rods in the motor? I have just had mine replaced with pauters during my rebuild. I have had a few friends stay with the ti rods only to meet disaster. They can get brittle over time and I know the rod bolts are not reusable as they will "stretch". Since this is the heart of the motor it is an important issue.

[Blanco]

Awesome read.

[Henry Schmidt]

Bill at Critical Operations can x-ray the rods and give a nondestructive analysis of the rods.
John Edwards at Costa Mesa R&D can rebuild the rods.
ARP offers a rod bolt kit (nuts, bolts & washers) specifically for Porsche 935/962 Ty rods.
As for reusing the rod bolts, although I don't advocate reusing titanium rod bolts in this project I can say that I have personally had over 250 ty rod bolts x-rayed and analyzed with 0 failures.
Call for phone numbers and part numbers.

[helidoc]

Originally posted by Henry Schmidt
Bill at Critical Operations can x-ray the rods and give a nondestructive analysis of the rods.
John Edwards at Costa Mesa R&D can rebuild the rods.
ARP offers a rod bolt kit (nuts, bolts & washers) specifically for Porsche 935/962 Ty rods.
As for reusing the rod bolts, although I don't advocate reusing titanium rod bolts in this project I can say that I have personally had over 250 ty rod bolts x-rayed and analyzed with 0 failures.
Call for phone numbers and part numbers.

VZ935, yes I plan to reuse the rods. I agree that Ti can be brittle but in talking to engineers the issue appears to be bending and rebending. You can only do it once or it is prone to fracture. Since mine appear to be in good shape I think I will be ok talking to the machinist. I hope the problem your friend had was the exception!

Henry, you gave me an idea. We had to play around with the xray dosage a bit. I thought it would take a lot but in reality titanium has about the same modulus of elasticity as human bone so it didn't take that much. These photos are after about 4 trys and I can't see any cracks or defects. I don't know how accurate my technique is compared to penetrating florescent dyes or magnaflux.

[ischmitz]

So you used a medical X-ray machine . That is a cool idea. BTW, it is the atomic number (22 for Ti, 20 for Ca) that makes bone and titanum to have very similar cross-sections for X-rays. Way to go.

Ingo

[CBRacerX]

Very clever. I would still perform a dye comparison, it is easy, cheap and fast. I think it is the prudent "belt and suspenders" approach here. Not sure that the x-ray film represents any potential stress riser cracks that would be in cross section to the x-ray film (i.e. on the "side" surface of the rod).

Keep up the great work

Chris

[Mahler9th]

Well, as a biomedical engineer (by training) that started out in x-ray and CT, I'd have someone involved with automotive material assessment involved with the imaging of my rods! I did a lot of kooky things with med. imaging equipment back in the day, before I became a "car" guy. I remember that we imaged some jet engine remnants from at least one bad airliner crash...

I love this thread as I have seen this car at the track and I think I even raced against it. Well I guess you cannot call it racing since I wasn't in a prototype. And the 962 is my "dream" race car, right next to a turbocharged F1 car. A 962 is the second thing I'd buy if I ever bought a big lotto ticket and won. It is cool to follow the progress of the surgical approach to disassembly. It will hopefully be cool to follow the progress of reassembly and installation as well. Most car people never see this kind of stuff. I get to see some of it because I visit JWE/Morspeed every so often. It is really neat to follow this on the internet... what a great invention.

I hope that when this car and Van's 935 are done that they will show up at some Porsche Racing Club events!! If not to race, at least bring 'em out for show-- perhaps at our annual season-ender at Sears Point....

Best of luck with the project!

Mike

[David]

The X-ray's neat but I think dye penetrant would be better in this application. Of course I don't deal with much Ti at work.

Still enjoying watching this thread.

[Carrera3.5L]

Helidoc,

Neil Harvey just called me and is trying to get in contact with you. He called and left a message with the phone number you left with him but thought that I may be able to get hold of you quicker through this board.

I also sent you a PM, and tried to send an email but apparently you requested no emails through this board so I'm SOL on that front.

Hopefully you'll see one or both of these messages to call or email Neil as soon as you have the opportunity.

He wants to send you some updated pics of your motor that hopefully you'll share with the rest of us.

Kind of ironic (and hopefully Heli doesn't get upset with me sharing this tidbit), but Neil dyno'ed Heli's engine at Andial. Heck, if you dust for prints, maybe you'll find my grubby hands on the motor somewhere as well.

Ralph

[VZ935]

Mahler9th/Mike ,
I never met a 935 I didn't like to race! I'm a racer so no worries..I plan on taking the car to Thunderhill for the shake down hopefully in Feb or March. Have some fun with it then the Monterey Historics in August 06 .
I am sure Helidoc wouldn't be rebuilding his motor if he didn't want to have a little fun with it afterwards

[helidoc]

I’m baaaaack….!

It has been almost 2 weeks since I had anything to post but I have been trying to keep things rolling behind the scenes. For one thing I have been trying to educate myself a little more about Porsche engines so I took the Bruce Anderson/Jerry Woods 4 day course on how to rebuild a 911 motor. That has given be a little more understanding about some of the basic principles in involved. Although the 962 motor is significantly different in many ways from the basic 911 motor, it still shares many common features. One thing that caught my eye was a picture Bruce had of an early design airplane 911 derived engine Porsche was thinking of building. It appeared to have the same gear driven camshaft system as in the 962. The evolution of the 911 motor is quite interesting and Bruce did a good job presenting it. While Bruce was presenting the didactics Jerry did the grunt work of completely disassembling and reassembling an early 911 engine. Along the way he explained in great detail what he was doing, why and background information that kept our interest. I usually go to educational meetings and often find myself trying to stay awake but did not seem to have that problem at their course. Jerry was a master at answering questions and made it seem as if a specific question was supposed to be asked at that time and incorporating into the talk. I also appreciated that I was able to ask questions about the 962 motor and hope that the rest of the class didn’t mine too much. It was $600 well spent in my mind and would recommend it to anyone that is planning on doing his or her own motor. After the class it was back home and time to buy a few more tools and things I will need to time my engine like a degree wheel, some Dow Corning products and one of Jerry’s favorites….MPZ! One of the concepts I came away with and reinforced by my next stop at Neil Harvey’s shop is the difference between an engine “builder” and an engine “assembler” of which most of us are probably the later. There is more involved than just putting parts together. Attention to detail does make a difference and we probably get away with more than we realize.

Yesterday I awoke in the Fleabag Motel near Disneyland to start the next phase of this project, the inspection and machining. Neil, at Performance Developments, had some family things to do in the morning and since it was only 7 miles away, I decided to go over to Porsche Motor Sports of North America and talk to the guys there. It resides in a rather unassuming, unmarked building in an industrial park and right across the lot lies Andial. As you know this was the birthplace of my engine as it’s latest reincarnation. However Andial appears to be a streetcar shop now since Porsche bought out the racing section from what I understand was a 3-partner operation. Wandering around in the parking lot I met Roger Grago, the Parts Sales guy for PMNA. Although we had a nice chat about the car and other topics, I was disappointed to find out that PMNA was disinclined to sell me much in the way of any engine parts. Apparently they prefer to hold on to the parts so they can rebuild the engines themselves for their customers. I was told that they do have some other external parts they will sell….and oh yes, they can sell me a parts manual (now I can get the latest part number for the part I can’t buy…LOL !). I was reminded again about the perilous waters I was entering in rebuilding the engine myself but that even if I did want to have them build the motor that it would be quite sometime before they could do it with already 4 motors in their shop. I was hoping to talk to their builder, Eric, but alas he was on vacation. While there I also met their new president, back his first day from Frankfurt who informed me that they might be expanding their 962 support later next year so maybe things will change in the future. Roger and I then said our good byes and told me I could always try and send him a parts request and he would see what he could do.

I then wandered over to Andial and met one of the old partners, Dieter. I was told he might have some of the paperwork on my motor. He didn’t think he did but said he would check with Alwin Springer, his previous partner that handled all the race engines.

From Andial it was off to Neil’s shop. I got there before he did and had a friendly chat with a machinist, Al, that does some special jobs for Performance Developments. He works part time having done work in the aerospace industry and has retired from it. He was able to give me some valuable tips to try out the next time I work with my mill and lathe, hopefully correcting some of the problems I have had in the past. Some things just aren’t in the books and have to be passed on by experienced mentors. He pointed out some of the innovations they were working on with respect to 944 engines and some of the tools he had made. Interesting stuff.

Neil’s shop I would call small by most standards if using square feet, but it is clean, well organized, and crammed with all the necessary tools of the trade. There was his secretary/office person, Paula, who allows him to practice his profession, Jose his helper in the shop, and another gal that was putting together wiring harnesses when I got there. Jose helped me get my parts onto trays and immediately started cleaning things up. Parts go from a solvent tank to a big dishwasher-like cleaner before then going off to the ultrasonic tank and into an oven to dry (my wife has been wanting me to replace one of our dishwashers at home and I think I may be able to use it to clean parts in the future….I now may have some motivation to replace it!). He has the customary lathe and vertical mill along with a Serdi machine for cutting the valve seats and doing valve work. He even has a flow-measuring machine.

Neil showed up a little after 11 AM. After a bit we finally got settled in to how we were going work out my project together since the way I am doing things is a little bit different than most of his customers who have him do the whole motor. None-the-less, he is a knowledgeable friendly straightforward fellow, who appeared happy to go out of his way to share his knowledge and help me out. He took the time to spend the rest of the day taking apart the sub assemblies allowing me to watch, take pictures and ask questions. I appreciated the fact he did this, as I know it was out of the usual sequence that he does things. We worked on things until about 6 PM or so and I was able to see now essentially the disassembly of the whole motor. We got the heads pressed out of the water jacket, the valves removed from the heads, the cam gear housing taken apart, disassembled the oil pumps. I was encouraged to see that things seemed to be in pretty good shape for the most part and parts don’t initially seem to have succumbed to the common major issues that face these motors. We did find evidence of a small foreign body that had passed through one section of the scavenge oil pump and there were 4 missing oil nozzles for the valve caps in the cam holder. The cylinders appeared to be within tolerances on a dial bore gauge. So I am a little relieved based upon Neil’s initial expert evaluation but realize that there is still a lot of inspection and evaluation yet to come. Interestingly enough and demonstrating how small this world is, Neil went through some of his old paper work and found out that he had actually dyno’ed my engine back in 1991. This will also be helpful information in timing the engine since the cams are the same. Who knows, maybe we’ll find Ralph’s fingerprints as well.

So all in all it was a productive trip and I left feeling a little upbeat as I entered the the LA freeway system with its mass of humanity and cars for the 5 hour trip home over the Grapevine and up the central valley. I will try and post some pictures of the trips an update as more comes along.

[helidoc]

Some more photos. Also I have included a photo of some one else's block where the 7 main bearing journal has cracked, apparently a common problem. Fortunately mine is ok.

[Porschekid962]

Kickass! What was being explained with that marker drawing on the newspaper? just curious, sounds like an extremely fun and tiring project.

[jacko241]

How bout those dyno results! Over 767 corrected hp at 8000 rpm! What an amazing time it was in sports car racing. I miss those days.

[ChrisBennet]

Great stuff!

I might be a little easier to read if you didn't put the pictures side by side - it makes text wider than my monitor so I have to scroll every line horizontally to read it. Edit button, hint, hint.

-Chris

[Jim Williams]

The photos are all stacked vertically on my browser...

[efhughes3]

Great stuff. Ditto on the pics side by side....

Question: How did Andial come about the correction factor? It looks like they use about a 6% correction. The rule of thumb everyone here uses seems to be 15%, myself included.

Just wondering if we're talking the same thing (drive train power loss), and the method to their madness. Ralph, and insight?

[Mr Beau]

Ed,

The engine is not in a vehicle so the correction factor would use the standard SAE 1394 formula that takes into account air temperature, pressure, humidity etc.

[helidoc]

Here are some new pictures from Neil showing how he is checking out the valve springs. He found a problem with one of the springs but I need to clarify the details.


Also a picture of the tool to remove the cam nuts.


Sorry about the pictures appearing side by side on some of your browsers but I am not sure that is something I can correct. The previews are fine on my computer but then again I am a Mac user. I know what you are saying though as I was showing one of my partners the thread on his Windows based machine and saw the same thing you are talking about.

[DW SD]

Originally posted by helidoc

Sorry about the pictures appearing side by side on some of your browsers but I am not sure that is something I can correct. The previews are fine on my computer but then again I am a Mac user. I know what you are saying though as I was showing one of my partners the thread on his Windows based machine and saw the same thing you are talking about. [/B]

Helidoc-
I thank you for sharing - this thread is most enjoyable.

I believe if you use a carriage return between photos that you will not have side by side photos, but a series all posted in a column. I learned that through trial and error and seems to work, albeit from a Windows / Explorer based machine.

Thanks again,

Doug